In the Creeds, in the Quran, and in the Modernist Controversy

The claim entered the confessional formulas very early, and its place there is why it carries a weight that its two gospel attestations alone would not give it. Both the Apostles and the Nicene creeds state that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, and both are recited weekly across Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches, so a Christian who says nothing else about the birth says this.

The Quran affirms the conception without a human father in two extended passages, one in the chapter named for the family of Imran and one in the chapter named for Mary. Mary is told of a son and asks how, given that no man has touched her, and the answer is that God creates by saying be. The same passages reject the inference that Jesus is therefore the son of God, comparing his creation to that of Adam, who had no parents at all. So the two traditions agree on the event and disagree entirely about what it shows.

In the modern West the doctrine became a boundary marker. When American Protestantism divided in the early twentieth century, the virgin birth appeared on the short lists of fundamentals that a candidate for ministry could be asked to affirm, and it has been argued over on those terms since. It is also routinely confused with the immaculate conception, which is a Catholic doctrine about Mary being conceived without original sin and concerns her own conception rather than that of Jesus.